In a wide field of applications, it is necessary to perform analog-to-digital conversion (ADC). Different solutions for ADC exist, including: flash ADC, successive-approximation ADC, ramp-compare ADC, Wilkinson ADC, integrating ADC, and Sigma-Delta ADC.
Different ADC technologies face different drawbacks and limitations. Typically, this results in the different ADC technologies being employed in different fields of technology: e.g., in audio applications, Sigma-Delta ADC is the most common approach, because the speed of ADC is not critical; on the other hand, where there is a need of high accuracy ADC employing Sigma-Delta techniques, typically the required space of the respective circuitry increases and the power consumption is high.